Chaosium, Inc.
They are the
makers of Call of Cthulhu, a horror RPG set in the supernatural world of
H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Mulder and Scully have never met the Elder Gods.
As well, they publish Elric, a heroic sword & sorcery RPG
and Pendragon, set in King Arthur's Britain.

The Nyarlathotep Cycle contains a collection of short stories centered around
the figure of Nyarlathotep--the messenger and "Crawling Chaos" of the Old Ones-- and
as a short story collection, this book succeeds admirably.

The book begins with an article by Mr. Price in which he attempts to persuade
his readers that "Nyarlathotep is the Hindu god Nath, or Siva." I think he fails to
prove his thesis, but the article is not long, and the reader can safely ignore it.

What exactly is Nyarlathotep? H.P. Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep's originator, wrote
in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner that "Nyarlathotep is a nightmare--an actual
phantasm of my own," and he had envisioned the creature as being "a kind of
itinerant showman or lecturer who held forth in publick [sic] halls and aroused
widespread fear and discussion with his exhibitions."

This is a far cry from a Hindu god, and while Nyarlathotep grew in Lovecraft's
fiction to embody far more than the persona of a showman, "It" was certainly never
meant to be appended to one of the world's major religions.

Fortunately, the stories and poems in The Nyarlathotep Cycle can be enjoyed
simply as a story collection, with contributions by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft,
Robert Bloch, Lin Carter, and Lord Dunsany.

The best-known fiction from this collection is certainly Lovecraft's
"The Dreams in the Witch House" and "The Haunter of the Dark."

"The Dreams in the Witch House" is the story of Walter Gilman, a student
at Miskatonic University in Arkham, who takes a room in a house with a bad
history. Gilman spends much of the story in a feverish state, walking at night
outside our known dimensions with a witch named Keziah Mason and her
familiar--Brown Jenkin. Gilman descends ever deeper into Keziah's
machinations, which culminate on the evening of April thirtieth in a child
sacrifice and a combat between Gilman and Keziah. As always, Lovecraft does
a better job with this sort of story than his host of imitators generally manage.

"The Haunter of the Dark" is not quite as successful in rousing the
reader's sense of horror, possibly because it suffers from one of those endings
where we're expected to believe that a man in mortal fear for his life spends his
last moments writing "I see it--coming here-- hell-wind--titan blur--black
wings--Yog-Sothoth save me--the three-lobed burning eye...."

There is, in this story collection, the usual--and unfortunate--piece
by August Derleth.
Generally, Derleth's pieces appear in anthologies because he edited them,
but here Mr. Price believes this to be "one of Derleth's finest." There are
moments when "The Dweller in Darkness" takes on a menacing air, but for the
most part, Derleth's characters are laughable.
One professor writes in his journal: "Partier says I am on the wrong track. I'm not convinced.
Whoever it is that plays the music in the night is a master of hellish
cadence and rhythm. And, yes, of cacophony."

The best piece in The Nyarlathotep Cycle is quite possibly the
novelette "Curse of the Black Pharaoh" by Lin Carter. The pharaoh, in the
form of a mummy, is seen by Robert Price as a form of Nyarlathotep. There
is some evidence for this, as Lovecraft, in "The Haunter of the Dark," has a
passage that closely resembles the plot-line of Carter's piece. In "Curse
of the Black Pharaoh," an expedition discovers the Lost Pyramid of Khotep,
and raids the Black Pharaoh's burial chamber. Carter does an excellent job
in setting his scenes throughout his work, and the description of the mummy
is quite vivid:

The gaunt cadaver was tightly wrapped from head to foot in spiced linen
bandages which time had withered into dirty brown strips of crumbling cloth,
splotched here and there where the preservative gums had leaked through to
stain the bandages. The wrappings over the face had rotted away, exposing the
ghastly skull-like face of the thing. Here and there it had grown scaly and
leprous with decay, and on the brow it had rotted away entirely, exposing the
brown bare bone of the skull.

There are nice touches throughout Carter's story, and his knowledge
of Egyptology gives the story an authoritative air. I have no idea if Carter
actually researched the many details of ancient Egypt and mummification that
are found in this story, but Carter seems to know what he's talking about,
and that's all that really matters in fiction, anyway.
The plot-line is contrived, and Carter introduces a romantic element that
has all the fire of a piece of soggy bread, but this was a story that made me
go look in my walk-in closet before I turned out the lights.

With the exception of the aforementioned story by Derleth, I found The
Nyarlathotep Cycle to be an enjoyable story collection. I might quibble with
Mr. Price about what W.B.
Yeats is doing in this anthology, but generally, I was pleased with what was
included and found the inclusion of some short pieces by completely unknown
authors refreshing.

Steve is faculty member in the English department at Piedmont Technical College in
Greenwood, S.C. He holds a master's in English Literature from Clemson University. He
was voted by his high school class as Most Likely to Become a Young Curmudgeon.